Improving College Access and Completion for Low-Income and First-Generation Students: The Role of College Access and Success Programs. Testimony to the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., April 2015

In this congressional testimony, Professor Perna described the disadvantages faced by low-income students aspiring toward a post-secondary degree. She offered five recommendations for federal policy aimed at overcoming these barriers: 1) Assist students with navigating pathways into and through college, with particular attention to financial aid processes. 2) Target students with the greatest financial need. 3) Encourage programs to recognize the state, regional, and local context and characteristics of students served. 4) Leverage federal spending to serve greater numbers of students. 5) Encourage research and evaluation to improve understanding of what works.

“To provide all students with meaningful opportunities for higher education, we must address the structural failings in our educational system.” That’s how Professor Perna framed the problem of inequitable college-education attainment in this concise talk of April 2016. She discussed the gaps in attainment between groups, why they exist, and what we might do to close them. Students, she said, need three things in order to enroll and succeed in college: financial resources, sufficient academic preparation, and the necessary knowledge and support to navigate their way into and through college. Professor Perna discussed the five-state policy study she conducted with Joni Finney, probing into the forces influencing higher education attainment in each state and looking for lessons that could lead to solutions.

In this wide-ranging 2021 interview with Delaware College Scholar Jordan Bonner, Professor Perna discussed the barriers that stand in the way of truly equitable higher-education opportunities. “We have individual agency in the decisions we make,” she said, “but so many of the outcomes for different people are really determined by the options that are available. Who has how much money to pay the costs, are there different resources for different groups? That really gets at my passion: how can we level the playing field to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to achieve their dreams?” She noted that college promise programs offer hope, not only by providing financial assistance but by sending the message that “college is possible.”

Research Minutes is a weekly podcast offering discussions of new and important education research. In this episode from 2020, Laura Perna joined Jonathan Supovitz, executive director of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to discuss the effectiveness of “net price calculators.” These are tools that the federal government requires all colleges participating in federal student aid programs to post on their websites to provide cost information to prospective students. Professor Perna co-led a study on the accuracy of net price calculators at dozens of college and found that many institutions are providing incomplete, outdated, or misleading information.